


fevers inherited

by Irrelevancy



Series: apollesthai [2]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Cannibalism, Cannibalism Play, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fisting, M/M, Mythology References, No Smut, Vivisection, actual cannibalism, but make it romantic, but there is, coming to terms with cannibalism is the best summary of this i guess, consensual cannibalism, it's actually sweet i swear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-10
Updated: 2020-01-10
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:01:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22192207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irrelevancy/pseuds/Irrelevancy
Summary: Fire is an amazing thing.The consensual cannibalism sequel.
Relationships: Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco/Portgas D. Ace
Series: apollesthai [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1597477
Comments: 24
Kudos: 73





	fevers inherited

**Author's Note:**

> ...back at it again with the bloodiest kinks and theological justifications! marco's greek now i guess.
> 
> Title's from Natalie Wee's poem aptly called ["When I Say I Want to Learn Your Mother's Recipe, I Mean."](https://cosmonautsavenue.com/natalie-wee-poetry/)
> 
> Content warnings at end!

Marco heard a legend growing up.

_What’s fire?_ some particularly prescient two-year-old might’ve asked her mother at an evening bonfire. _Where did it come from?_

The mother, seated with knife and fork to split a thick cut of fire-charred meat into bites, might’ve smiled in proud delight. She might’ve adjusted her robes, cleared her throat, and started the story for all the surrounding tots to hear.

_Fire’s an amazing thing, isn’t it?_ In that village where Marco grew up, not everyone knew how to hunt, and not everyone knew how to pick non-poisonous mushrooms. But everybody, as soon as their chubby little hands could, knew how to start a fire. _That’s because it was stolen from the gods._

* * *

Ace caught him on a foggy morning, two weeks back on the Moby Dick.

Caught, Marco thought, was the perfect word for this: clawed and fisting hands, pushy arms. Truly a child of the jungle, Ace pounced on him out of nowhere, breath and teeth all of a sudden fire-hot against Marco’s trachea. Like a jaguar pinning a hawk.

“Can we,” Ace practically snarled against him, “ _talk_?”

_You started it_ , Marco kind of wanted to protest, but quickly quashed the childish urge. Fact was, it took two people to keep a silence, and he was no more or less responsible than Ace for their current tense stalemate.

Still though, there was… _something_ , mauling at him from the inside. A songbird swallowed whole has found its utterance again, shook free the seared skin and regrew feathers; it was shrieking for justice.

“Is that,” the bird inside Marco said, pouring fury through its beak, “all you want to do?”

Fire—all blame and pure rage—ignited Ace’s eyes, and Ace _bit_.

With his flesh and tendons clamped between Ace’s teeth, Marco let his eyes flutter shut. The songbird expired as his blood reached boil, and Marco’s sight too filled with the kinetics of red plasma. There was a story Marco knew that began before the gods and humans were so definitively split—about Prometheus, the Fore-Thinker.

_H_ _ow do you know a human from a god?_ Marco thought, as he glided his hands slowly up Ace’s back. _I_ _t’s that only humans_ feel _like gods. Gods just are. Isn’t it funny how the very moment a man thinks himself a god, he damns himself to mortality?_

Marco felt the bare muscles under his palm bunch, _hurt_ , then loosen. The teeth holding him never once shifted in their deliberation on drawing blood. How do you feel, he wanted to ask Ace. Or; what would you rather be, god or man?

_When the gods told humans to bring forth animal sacrifices, Prometheus came up with a clever ruse. Bull bones in one basket topped with gleaming fat, bull meat in the other hidden under unpleasant offal. Whatever the gods choose, Prometheus proposed, humans keep the other for themselves to eat._

“I’m not sorry,” Marco whispered to Ace, and felt Ace shudder in his arms. “The first _or_ second time.”

Ace’s teeth released with a growl of frustration, and an incisor snagged flesh on its way out. The blood tickled on its way down Marco’s neck, and pain bloomed far too slowly and impotently for Marco’s—hah!— _tastes_.

“You—” Ace’s expression was marred by conflict, but he was one of the best fighters Marco’s ever known; the battle extinguished in moments, and castigation came out the winner. It thrilled Marco terribly to see this version of Ace again; it hadn’t graced the Moby, really, since Ace took Pop’s mark on his back. “I _ate_ you.”

You helped me eat you, was what Marco, fluent in fire, could parse from Ace’s crackling heart.

“You _survived_.”

_Having chosen the fat and gotten only bone, the gods grew angry and laid upon the humans two punishments: first, the retracted gift of fire. Humans shall suffer forever the torments of winter and the slick of raw meat._

“You had _no right_ to make me survive off of you.”

_Second—and this was by far the more devastating punishment—the retracted gift of life. Like the meat kept by the humans after Prometheus’ trick, humans shall suffer rot and death. Like the bones they discarded, the gods shall remain eternal._

“But I did that to you,” was Marco’s retort, teeth-gnashing in its anguish. He didn’t mean the survival, he meant the conditions necessitating it. _I am Prometheus_. “You’re _mortal_ , Ace, terrifyingly mortal. But I—”

_Of course, when Prometheus tried to repent to the humans by stealing back the fire, the gods chained him down and open on a rock, where birds of prey came daily to feast upon him._ _You love humans so much? the gods sneered. Then you shall never_ _get to_ _join them. Your punishment_ _is_ _immortality, and to w_ _atch your_ _beloved_ _humans die for_ _ever_ _._

Ace’s eyes went cold, the fire stolen out of them.

“You think,” he said, tightening grips on Marco’s wrists until both sets of fingertips went pale, “you deserve to be eaten, just because you can survive it?”

_Isn’t it only fair_ , Marco thought desperately of Prometheus’ fate, _that while the humans ate and died and ate and died, he suffered eternity to be eaten, be eaten, be eaten?_

Ace’s knife found air, freed from its suffering sheathe.

“Good,” Ace said, as Marco’s pupils went dark and wide. “So do I.”

* * *

_Let’s start_ , Ace had said, once Marco’s clothes were tossed haphazardly over furniture and the meat of his thighs were all exposed, _with the first meal._

Marco wanted to ask how Ace had known it was thigh meat, but the look of intense concentration, when Ace lined up the dagger edge, made him sigh the question fondly away. And when the dagger bit, Marco closed his eyes, felt the parting of muscles like a fist unclenching, like petals of a bud unfurling. In Marco’s youth, Pops had once landed them on an island of blood-drinking roses. The flowers’ fragrance upon bloom insinuated predators into such delirious frenzy that upon charging the bushes, the animals impaled themselves on their wicked, hollow thorns.

That grotesque bouquet—Marco remembered the full moon evening so vividly, his bird drawn out to suck in great lungfuls of the stuff, but ultimately too chained down upon the bedrock of humanity to dash himself willingly dead on a thousand sharp primordial things. The scent memory overlaid itself so finely on the scene now like a mist of perfume: Ace’s knife plunged into the bed with boulder-cracking force, Ace’s teeth like fangs like thorns descending on the cut and Marco—

He wanted to _shudder_ but he forced himself still, because he knew with the tremble would come the feathers, and the feathers were as good as magma in their persistent, invasive push up through earth’s crust; it would fill in the cracks until bedrock was whole again. Until Marco’s chains were filled out again. There could be no _healing_ , no respite from the bite of the knife and the bite of the roses, retroactively through his memories.

And the memory, like a debt, dissipated once paid for. All was Ace again, red on his face like petals.

“So damn mortal,” Ace said, voice the sound of snapping ligaments. “Fine. _I’m_ the human, and you’ve still managed to kill a version of me. We can never go _back_ from this.”

Marco’s breath hitched when Ace trailed a finger down the now-messy gouge in Marco’s thigh. Unfamiliar red tickled, stung, _scorched_ the skin, and Marco’s cry was almost a song.

“I _know_ ,” he hissed, saltwater shaken into steam by the _heat_ convecting under Marco’s skin. “But I can’t regret saving you Ace, I can’t—”

“You must,” Ace said, “think yourself a god.”

Marco felt that _crack_ go so deep in and _through_ him, until not just the boulder but the entire mountain has split, under the wedge and hammer of Ace’s sheer belief that Marco wasn’t _shit_. Marco laughed in gratitude, thick heaves of it. _No god would need to think himself a god_ , Marco reminded himself. _I must be human be human be human—_

“ _Please_ ,” came the very human croak, full of very human emotions like base desire and the willingness to pay for it. “Then make me _feel_ —”

“The second meal I made of you,” Ace interrupted, firm and quite godlike now in his fiery conviction. His teeth gritted so hard that sparks flew between enamel. “What was it?”

Marco lifted his arm, elbow tucked above his ear.

“Triceps.” Because he had wanted to give Ace a bit of variety in nutrition, and fat stored most readily there on Marco’s body. Another memory, more hallowed than the roses but no less bloody: Ace returned to recalcitrancy, Day However Many on that wind-whipped island. That Ace had been as grim and angry as a pyre. Cooking hadn’t needed water’s mediation, and the grease from Marco’s burning meat had dripped so sensually, so inevitably between Ace’s fingers.

The Ace now, more determined torch than tortured pyre, went straight for the meat. No more marble-eyed contemplation of the offerings laid so readily at his feet. He caught the smooth and sensitive flesh of Marco’s tricep in between his front teeth and _pulled,_ bringing the knife around.

An awed and penitent gasp escaped Marco’s throat when the sliver of meat fell into Ace’s mouth. Ace drew back with parted lips, chin slathered with the same glistening red of pomegranate skin. There was no tension in his jaw to signal disgust—if anything, the easy line of his cheeks and neck were like the vaulting ceiling beams of a temple, the leisurely recipients of all incense and sacrificial smoke.

And where there was smoke—

When Ace’s tongue _licked_ into flames, Marco’s head dropped back with a helpless groan. His pupils carried with them the imprinted sight of Ace’s _transformation_. Fire truly was an amazing thing, and if Marco was Prometheus then Ace was his most precious stolen cargo, the bright and brilliant heat that could temperate winter, that could turn Marco’s tepid, unpleasant rawness into something fragrant that _dripped_. Luscious, indulgent, and so very sinful in the way he just _took_ Marco—but what did fire know of sin? And, as Marco bore witness to this sinless, yet nowhere close to holy consumption of himself he felt a tug in his gut. One that was less the goring of birds of prey, and more the bursting out of songbirds dripping red with fire. Food returned to life again.

And that fiery tongue, accompanied by hot _teeth_ , found its way back to Marco’s throat. It brought that heat lower, encouraged by Marco’s frantic whispering, scoring down sternum then swiping left over the ribs and _oh_ —

“Let me cut you open,” Ace murmured. He was the steel of his knife while Marco was flint, a conglomeration of a person meant to be taken apart; embers caught until Marco’s entire chest went fire-hot. “I’ve given you my fire, now let me feel yours.”

_What would you rather be, god or man?_ Marco had wanted to pose that question to the man in front of him, before that man became pure fire. Now, out of that fire poured—a god, perhaps. If flesh was mortal and the consumption of that mortal flesh was what made humans mortal, then maybe Ace who has consumed _im_ mortal flesh could be exempt from the penitence.

...Though just in case, Marco would also have Ace consume _bone_ to guarantee his apotheosis.

“Please,” was Marco’s shivered prayer. “I _want_ —”

“You,” Ace decided, “ _deserve_.”

* * *

He wanted to hold Marco’s heart. Marco drew him up a plan for success.

_Make the incision beneath my sternum, and reach up into my ribcage from underneath._ Because rib spreaders and bone saws, Marco thought, were surely second-vivisection sorts of instruments.

Ace took to Marco’s words like prayers took to manifestation; he kept the cut high and shallow enough to not knick the stomach or, god forbid, the intestines. The only hurt came from the bisection of Pop’s ink, and the red that spilled over Marco’s skin just made him want to tattoo it back in. He watched Ace contemplate drawing a second, horizontal line perpendicular to that central incision to make the opening bigger, easier to penetrate—watched Ace decide against it. Ace set the knife aside, and he watched Marco’s throat bob on a swallow with an almost-smirk.

“Hey. Relax.”

Two fingers first, long and aligned as they pushed through the incision. Marco could feel their edges, rough as bird talons, glide past every layer of epidermis, dermis, subcutaneous fat, push further into the hollow of him before finally _crooking_ , and opening Marco to the air.

Ragged breaths turned to keening, stifled cries as Ace got three, four fingers into him, then found the space between his parted skin with his thumb. The _sinking_ of Ace’s entire hand into Marco’s body, the way it nearly _fisted_ to knuckle Marco’s stomach out of his way—if Marco could move he’d surge up to capture the curious line of Ace’s lips between his lips. Between his _teeth_. Bite and let the fire claim his mouth too.

Instead, he kept his torso flat against the bed and _sank_ into the feeling of where his body was already on fire. His thigh, the blackened clots of blood on the walls of the gash like minerals crystallizing in water-washed geodes. His arm, blood still oozing, magma unable to make its patch. His abdomen, where Ace’s hand was hot-pressing him open, stretching his opening with an ever-widening forearm and pushing its way past his _lungs_ —

—and it didn’t feel so much as pain on the inside, but just _strange_. Was this, Marco wondered dizzily, how the gods felt ingesting bone for the first time? Something permanent and _inevitable_ penetrating the body?

“Breathe for me Marco,” Ace reminded. Marco did, and watched wide-eyed as Ace’s mouth fell open in awe, when Marco’s lungs expanded and the spongey tissue gripped around his hand. Ace was beginning to look the part of the believer too, godly glow shifting into something only the slightest decibel dimmer: total human pleasure. Marco breathed again, and kept breathing and breathing for Ace to feel, until Ace’s eyelashes fluttered shut. Until Ace had to lick his lips with a human tongue. “...Yeah, that’s it. I’m gonna keep going now.”

Ace’s hand kept pushing, kept _entering_ , and surely Marco’s mattress was entirely soaked through with blood now. Marco almost couldn’t breathe with it (but kept breathing, kept breathing), and his hands and feet have long-since gone completely numb. He was _dying_ —but it was only through death that Marco could best prove that he was alive. That he was every bit as mortal as he accused Ace of being, that an eternity of dying every day was still dying—

Ace has found the heart of him. Marco could _feel_ him—gods, Ace was so overwhelmingly _in_ him—cupping the organ in his palm weighingly, almost protectively. Marco could hear his own pulse speeding (felt the faster drain of the last reserves of blood in him and that’s _fine_ , that’s fine, let the humans and gods fight over their meat and bones, Marco would just give his blood to the fire until all of red and plasma became indistinguishable). Wondered what Ace thought of this cardiovascular choreography conducted just for him.

Then, Ace whispered, “now heal for me, Marco.”

Marco was slow to parse the request, so caught was he on the crystalline crawl of cold up his body. Only the core of him was warm because that’s where Ace was; everything else can crack and crumble away, what should Marco care? He was only the bird with a fixation on the offal (as stuck in eternity as Prometheus was)—the rest of the man could disappear, as long as the one who ordered him eviscerated got what he wanted.

But—a red hand at his blue lips, more urgent in its touch than the hand inside him, still squeezing at Marco’s heart, wrapped in Marco’s failing lungs.

“Marco,” Ace _snarled_ , as vivid as ever in his fighting spirit. “You promised to let me _feel_ this.”

It’s with grueling, impossible effort—like pushing a stone up an endless hill no wait, that’s a different sufferer of eternity—that Marco remembered. He had to first remember that promise to Ace, and think _yes, I’ve proven my humanity, now he’ll restore me to life_. Then he had to remember how to unstopper his own flames, so awash was he in Ace’s red.

Those damn songbirds littered the bottom of Marco’s stomach, marinated, burned, plucked and eaten whole. Marco started with one of their corpses, threading its little blue life back in through the feathers. Entered its heart and squeezed it back to life. Felt its lungs inflate and throat chirp.

Did the same for the rest, until blue caught on blue caught on _song_ , and every single bird burst into flight. They sought every way out, shoving through the gouges and cuts in feathered puffs, flapping kinetic energy back into Marco’s hands and numb feet. Mostly though, they flew shrieking at the one glaring wound at the center of it all, the one that smelled of blood and just _wouldn’t heal_ —

—and this was Marco’s bird truly _unc_ _hained_ _,_ on the night of the blood-roses, free to dash and free to bleed and free to nuzzle the hand that split him open and held his heart—

Marco held his flames at bay, and it took hearing Ace’s breath come out in a shudder for Marco to realize he had closed his eyes. And that Ace’s free thumb was still slowly stroking a cheekbone (his other thumb stroking a ventricle), patiently coaxing him to return to life.

Marco did, and above him Ace looked—

—so _human_ —

—exhausted, but in a pleased way where all the marring on his brow were nearer to laugh lines. When he smiled, it was a little jarred, a little slid-out-of-place.

“I can feel you healing around me,” Ace said, sounding so unbelievably _touched_ by this. Marco, while not completely understanding, could by now extrapolate that what Ace felt now was probably similar to what Marco himself had felt just—minutes? Hours?—before, when Ace first brought out the knife and said he’d give Marco all that Marco deserved. It had felt like an _earning_ , a gift so enamoring that even the strongest norms of polite society couldn’t make Marco put it back. If Ace wanted to feel the same—who was Marco to stop him?

“It’s,” Ace was continuing to say, “incredible. Your heart, your lungs, your _skin_.” Then he paused. “I guess maybe you _are_ immortal, huh?”

Replenished now with blood, Marco could only ascribe his lightheadedness to the immense amount of _love_ he felt for the man before him, as he tossed his head back, and laughed and laughed.

* * *

“Do I,” Thatch choked, “want to know?”

Ace and Marco froze, the blood-soaked mattress held between their grips as limp as a bodybag.

“Oh, we—Uh. No?”

“We are taking this,” Marco uttered with great somberness, “to a recycling facility.”

“…Right. Anyways. Ace I got that steak you wanted for dinner—”

“— _oh_ , hey, thanks Thatch, that’s nice of you! But tell you what, I think maybe I’m actually feeling like a salad again today—”

“— _argh_ , no I _definitely_ didn’t want to know that what the fuck— _Why_. Do I not _feed_ you enough—?!”

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Ace uses a knife to cut Marco consensually and it's both implied and explicit that he bites the wounds. Also graphic erotic description of him cooking and eating Marco's flesh. Also he cuts open Marcos' torso and sticks his hand in, and there is explicit mention of touching the stomach the lungs and the heart.
> 
> My dearest thanks to Soggies for that Thatch ending, esp. Chromi for walking me through how to vivisect a man.
> 
> As always I'm on [tumblr](https://touchmycoat.tumblr.com/), leave a comment!!


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